Wednesday, June 28, 2006

at the main tn type site, i recently posted most of the early GILES marriages in tennessee that i have collected in the course of my research. you can view them | here |. please remember that the list is incomplete and is meant to be used for research leads and personal, noncommercial use only.

Saturday, June 24, 2006

margaret newport of rhea co, tn's first husband was william c. underwood, csa, who was killed in missouri on 10 aug 1861 at the battle of oak creek, now called the battle of wilson's creek. her brother asa newport was wounded that day in battle and died of typhoid a few days later.

my family had others in missouri during the war, and some recent news from the wilson's creek battlefield gives me hope that i can learn more about them:

a donation to the hulston library at wilson's creek battlefield of almost 1000 reels of nara compiled service records fills out that library's microfilm collection of detailed service history for civil war soldiers from missouri and surrounding states.

the microfilms can be viewed at the library. for me, the really good news is that currently staff members are answering informational requests via e-mail!

Sunday, June 18, 2006

the tennessee state library and archives keeps a genealogy help page for each tennessee county. in addition to highlighting the county's location on an outline map of the state and giving the name of the county seat and foundation information, the pages contain the following useful information - most in easy to locate list form:

the years in which census records are available for the county

selected county histories

a link to the archives' bibliography of local history sources

a list of published local records (including those published on microfilm)

county newspapers on microfilm at the archives

selected manuscripts regarding the county

indications of records available from the archives on interlibrary loan

roane county's history & genealogy fact sheet at the tennessee state library and archives can be accessed | here |

google's free picasa photo software now has a web album generator that will upload member photos directly to picasaweb.google.com. i have just uploaded a small album of photos taken at the bethel historic cemetery in kingston, tn to a new Tn Type site there. you can always check all of my public TnType picasaweb albums by using the link http://picasaweb.google.com/TnType. any of the photos posted in my public gallery may be downloaded for personal, noncommercial use in your genealogy research. find my bethel cemetery album | here |.

maneuvering across the shifting sands of records accessibility laws can easily frustrate the family genealogist.

this decade's stringent homeland security laws saw many of us cringe as even records publicly accessible for years were put under wraps to comply with new laws. we also discovered that we weren't the only ones practicing an increasing sensitivity to the risk of identity theft by putting family information online. as a result, those of us who already believed that a good family historian can never have too much documentation have revved up our storage mania and become bigger packrats than ever. i know that my own appreciation for those who willingly share vital family information with me has grown exponentially in the last three or four years. I'm just about ready to offer up a special daily prayer of thanks to contributors to genforum and rootsweb message boards and to (the thankfully-still-free) worldconnect.

today, i read a stanford university report of june 14, that the the library of congress has awarded the university funds toward a collaborative inititiative to preserve digital records for future generations. the initiative relies heavily on lockss (lots of copies keep stuff safe) and clockss (controlled lockss), technologies and programs designed to make certain that digital libraries' contents don't get lost or destroyed because of reliance on one centrally-administered repository.

genealogy researchers who have lost research due to failures in backing up their digital work on a home computer; those of us who have searched diligently for records only to discover that they were destroyed in a courthouse fire; or those of us who bemoan the hoops we have to jump through to get vital records information [ see one blog's take | here | ] because of homeland security laws or identity theft these days may certainly appreciate the lots of copies keep stuff safe mentality.

Seven million pages of new information are added to the world-wide-web each day.... [A]cademic libraries are faced with the urgent problem of creating online collections with the staying power of traditional hardcopy books and journals. Information stored on paper can survive for millennia; information stored digitally today may not be recoverable next week.

and there, too, from thomas jefferson:

...let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident." In Thomas Jefferson: Writings: Autobiography, Notes on the State of Virginia, Public and Private Papers, Addresses, Letters, edited by Merrill D. Peterson. New York: Library of America 1984.

Sunday, June 11, 2006

i have just published a photo album of the bean community cemetery at white's creek in rhea co, tn. through the album you can access photos, family notes, transcripts, and mapping. it's available on my companion rootsweb site | here |.(note that the 1930s wpa survey of this cemetery called it the kirkland cemetery. locals say, however, that this always been the bean cem,ketery.)

Friday, June 09, 2006

gold bug, the makers of animap now offer a terrific online place locating service which can map its results to google maps. it's called site finder, and is located | here |.

a description of this new free genealogy tool on company's home page concisely lays out a number of uses for the researcher:

SiteFinder Online lets you search for towns, cemeteries, schools, courthouses (and more) and plot them onto Google Maps where you can zoom in & out or overlay the SiteFinder locations onto satellite images of area you are studying. You can plot multiple items at once, or search for your exact point of interest. [source: Gold Bug, http://www.goldbug.com, accessed 9 jun 2006]